


grace for sinners & saints

by peterstank



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, I hope, M/M, and the girls - Freeform, anyway it can’t be worse than whatever the hell the cursed child was trying to be, i mean the amount of times i cracked ribs while writing this, it’s great it’s funny, lily befriending all of the Lads before she so much as gives james the time of day, lily evans being a three dimensional character with her own relationships and life outside of james, pun absolutely intended, remus mooning for sirius, the later years are gonna cover jily more but the first few are mostly just about The Boys, was actually ZERO but still
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27345076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterstank/pseuds/peterstank
Summary: Without thinking, Sirius slides off his own stool and goes over to him, wrapping his arms around Charlus’s ribcage and holding on tight.“Sirius—”“He’s your friend?”Charlus looks down at him, one hand now on the back of Sirius’s head, and nods. “Yes,” he whispers. “One of my very closest and most dear.”And what would it be like, Sirius wonders, if it were James? What would he do if suddenly that lovely idiot upstairs just up and vanished?Tear the world apart brick by brick, probably, until naught was left but rubble. He’d burn cities, he imagines, and raze forests to the ground, and it would be like breathing without lungs or having a heart with no blood to pump.or: whoever said ‘all is fair in love and war’ probably never fell in love or went to war.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & James Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 49
Kudos: 55





	grace for sinners & saints

**Author's Note:**

> hey :P

_“If aught must be lost, ’twill be my honor for yours. If one must be forsaken, ’twill be my soul for yours. Should death come anon, ’twill be my life for yours.  
_ _I am Given.”_

_—Karen Marie Moning_

  
  


i. heartline 

For James Potter, bravery is a smouldering fire that is constantly hungry, constantly devouring, always in need of feeding. 

The first kindling is gathered in those early years, spent roaming the empty and ancient halls of his ancestral home. The iron balustrades he slides down, the marble-tiled halls he muddies, the portraits he talks to as if they are still real people. 

His great-great grandfather, Hardev, who looks down his long narrow nose at James, snaps that red book closed he’s always holding, and barks at him to comb his hair. Lovedeep, who squirms in her salwar kameez and laments about the woes of being married off at the young age of five and ten. 

“Well,” he always tells her, “at least you’re not ugly like Geetha.” 

James is dwarfed by every statue, is humbled by every vaulted room and arch and column. In every brick and pane and stair, he is searching, he is marking, he is filling all that negative space. Rooting around in stone, trying to establish roots, only to find himself utterly unable to grow.

He spends evenings by the hearth, flat on his stomach with the ornate rug scratching his skin, reading aloud just to fill the silence. 

He spends mornings running around the grounds, climbing trees and falling, wondering: is the sound of his arse hitting the ground real if no one else is around to hear it? 

Of course there is his mother, who fusses over every scratch, and yet still listens to him ramble on about the invisible dragon he’d fought with a stick in the yard. She asks questions too, like: “What spell did you use to vanquish the Almighty Alfred?”

“No spells on account of it was a sword, not a stick.” He grins. “I stabbed him up the bum!”

That summer, his mother gets into a shouting match with his father. James gets on his knees and peers through the keyhole as they argue, though he can hear perfectly through the door. He just wants to _see_ them row. It’s so rare, and such a sight to behold. 

“This place is too big for him, Charlus!” Mum shouts. “It’s no place to raise a child!”

And James, though he does love the manor, privately agrees. His father, unfortunately, does not. James winces as the older wizard slaps his paper down and shoots to his feet, claiming that it cannot be, for the wards are configured to their presence in the manor and should they leave for such an extended period of time, the enchantments will fall. 

“Well that’s just ridiculous!” retorts Dorea. “Surely there is something else you can key them into! Or perhaps we could ensure to always come and stay once or twice a year in order to keep them strong—”

“Now, see here—” then Charlus stops, blinks, and straightens his spectacles on his nose. “That’s… actually a rather good idea.”

And that’s that, really. If James has learned anything by being the metaphorical cheese to his parents’ toastie, constantly smothered between the both of them, it’s that his mother is usually right. What’s more, his father can be painfully shortsighted at times, and it’s only because of her abundance in brain cells that he and James haven’t ended up lost in a trash can somewhere.

And so Charlus buys a little cottage in a partial wizarding settlement in West Country, and James spends an entire week learning every nook and cranny of the place. He counts every shilling on the roof and carves his own initials into the waist-high fence around the property, and delights in the overgrown nature of the garden, which is so drastically different from the perfectly manicured shrubbery back at the manor.

“This is where Godric Gryffindor himself lived,” his father tells him, white flakes dusting the shoulders of his jacket as he leans down to wrap his arms around James’s tummy. 

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” asks James, just for a good bit of cheek.

His father plays along. “Why, he was one of the four founders of Hogwarts. Surely I must have told you this story before? Surely, my only son has heard about the valiant conquests and hearty might of the most powerful wizard known to man?!” 

James laughs as his father tickles his sides. He somehow ends up on his back in the snow, squirming against his dad’s torments, a blush blossoming under his brown skin. 

When his father is done parping against his belly, he leans over James and smooths his hair away. It is a gentle touch, cold against all that heat inside him. Even in his most volatile moments, even in the face of James’s wildfire rage, Charlus will always be able to douse him down to embers.

“Tell me about him?” asks James, eager as always for the story. 

“He was the bravest wizard who ever lived,” his father starts, and James vows to be even braver than that.

For James Potter, bravery is a smouldering fire that is constantly hungry, constantly devouring, and love is the spark which feeds it. 

* * *

ii. lifeline 

For Sirius Black, bravery is a whiplash. 

It is a white-hot thing, a cord of burning heat twined around his spinebone. It’s the blood in his veins that he is told, from his first day, is ichor; the blood that spills and falls just as everyone else’s, the blood that runs red. 

He’d give it all for those that he loves, and those early days every drop belongs to Regulus alone. 

They grow up in that dimly-lit townhome in central London, squished between two residences just like it, completely invisible to the Muggle eye. Sirius spends his early life leaning against windowpanes, the ghost of his breath fogging the glass, wishing he could fall right through. 

Not to end it, though. He’s already had enough hurts, enough cuts, enough bruises. 

And isn’t that a funny thing: if his blood is so pure, why is his mother so eager to spill it? 

It doesn’t matter, of course. He is hot liquid in the unscarred palms of his little brother, and he will boil over or freeze as needed. 

The first time it happens, they are four and five. 

The both of them have been stuffed into stiff, collared robes, and told by Aunt Lucretia to sit and be silent. “No squirming,” she says, hushed and dark-lipped, long white fingers squeezing Sirius’s upper arm to convey her urgency. “You must look dignified for our guests.”

In truth, Sirius has little to no recollection of who those guests were. He can only remember Regulus getting bored and starting to fidget, and whispering to Sirius that he was hungry, and then stretching his little arm across the space between his chair and the tea table to grab at a powdered biscuit. 

The distance had been too great. The legs of his chair had scraped against the old, dark wooden floorboards, and the silver tray had tipped over and fallen on the rug. 

Sirius remembers moving first: shoving Reg back into the chair and dropping onto the ground. Every head in the room had whipped around just in time to see him shoving three biscuits down his gob in one go. 

“ _Diffindo!”_ from his mother, always his mother. Never Orion, who watches but never intervenes, nor inflicts any damage of his own. Those grey eyes remain perfectly impassive even that very first time, when the skin of his son and heir splits open, and all that red staines those nice expensive robes. 

The curses come again and again, and the cuts only get deeper. The stinging hexes to his backside, the nights spent on his stomach letting the wounds breathe, biting his feathered pillow to keep from crying. 

And Regulus, always Regulus, slipping through the dark of the night, creeping across Sirius’s bedroom floor to clamber up onto the mattress. There, they are safe. There, with only the moonlight pouring in through the smallest crack in the curtains like quicksilver, can they let go of it for a little while.

For Regulus, it’s fear. Always there and always writhing, slithering in his stomach like a little snake. For Sirius, it is anger, hot like coals and heavy, too. 

Regulus strokes his hair and says, “Thank you,” though he doesn’t need to. He could be the most insufferable prat on the planet and Sirius would still die for him, simply because this is his baby brother.

But Regulus is not insufferable. He is careful of his countenance, timid with every word, soundless with every step. He is water over stones and Sirius knows that one day, every last bastard who calls themselves a Black is going to drown in a river of this boy’s making. 

“But not you,” Regulus says, when Sirius heatedly proclaims this one night. 

“No?” asks Sirius, eyes flitting up from the book he’d been reading from. 

Reg, who is holding a little star nightlight in his hands, shakes his head in earnest. “No. I’d build you a little boat and you could row away.”

Sirius grins. There is no one on this Earth who understands him better than this boy, and though that won’t always be the case, still in blood and bone, still in root and twine, still in flesh and heart and magic and name and memory, Regulus will always be there. His name is etched on Sirius’s very marrow, and he is the only reason for… 

He is the only reason.

This boy who has learned to watch instead of react, to listen instead of speaking, to hide instead of shining like the star he was born to be. He is so bright and so sharp, so much more deadly than they will ever know. Even Sirius, who cradles him every night like the teddy he was never given; who sometimes forgets those edges are not soft, but bony; even Sirius will forget. 

But for now they exist together, a caduceus of intertwined limbs and branches on the tapestry wall. For now, Sirius beats for him, bleeds for him. He makes room by the windows and points—“See there, every night that Muggle man stands on the corner and asks for money, and then he goes into that charity shop and gives it all to them. They can’t be _that bad.”_

Regulus stares with those steel eyes. Sirius careens eagerly forward, smudging the windowpanes, desperate. 

Not to end it. To begin it.

* * *

iii. headline 

For Remus Lupin, bravery is found in squared jaws and straight spines and silence. Bravery is his father, who goes to work every morning knowing they could all be found out. It is his mother, who winds her arms around Remus’s jutting collarbones and kisses his cheek despite the scar there.

His mother tells him he’s brave. She is Hope, in both name and feeling. She sits by his bedside in the hours after the transformation and crests the worst of the pain just with her presence, rubbing his back and easing the aches away. “You’re so brave,” she whispers. “My brave, sweet boy.”

But Remus does not feel brave and he does not feel sweet in those hours beneath the burning full moon. He feels Animal, feels raw. He rips at the ground and at his own flesh just to have something to tear, just to have something to feel, just to have something to destroy. He howls and howls, and chafes his neck raw against the iron edge of the shackle, and whines and paces and froths at the mouth.

He’s never hurt anyone but himself, but they’ve been careful. Even when he’s not the Wolf, he has nightmares thinking of what could happen if those shackles ever broke, or if he somehow got out and—and did the things the Wolf so badly wants to do, tasted the manflesh the Wolf so desperately craves. 

The Wolf, scraping and snapping, imagines it would be warm. He imagines the sensation of it, of his maw digging deep and shaking his prey until it falls limp, gnawing and biting and—

“Breathe, Remus,” says his father, at three in the morning. Remus, who is a boy, who is a wizard, clings to John Lupin. His father flicks on the bedside lamp and swipes Remus’s sweat soaked hair from his brow. “Everything is going to be okay. It’ll all work out.”

And it sounds like a prophecy, when his dad says it. A prophecy like his own name. But it _feels_ like a lie. 

To Remus Lupin, bravery is when his mother gets sick and his dad keeps going. He keeps getting up every morning, and making sure she’s taking all of her medications, and making sure Remus is fed, and then shuffling off to work. 

His mother’s skin turns pale and her cheeks turn sunken. Her hair, which had been blonde and bright and long, turns thin like straw and breaks at the ends. Remus spends many hours at her bedside carefully combing the knots away, and then reading to her as she used to do for him. 

John Lupin comes home. He kisses both of them and makes dinner. That’s bravery.

Remus holds his father’s callused hand at the funeral. It’s quiet: just the two of them in the little graveyard downhill from Hogsmeade. It is Remus’s first funeral of many, and at the worst of them he will be on his knees and clawing at the dirt, screaming at the cracked open sky as droves of rain pour down from the Heavens. He will be cursing himself, and the man he once called a brother, in equal measure. 

Remus and John go home, bundled in sweaters and scarves. That night, Remus locks the chains around his own wrists and ankles, for his father’s gotten so drunk he’s passed out on the living room couch and forgotten.

For the first time, there is no one to remember to bar the cellar or board the windows. Remus does it himself, refusing to be sorry, swallowing up all that sad and promising to make some better kind of use for it. 

His father finds him curled up the next day, arm broken, chest gouged, and he cries harder than he had even on the day Hope died. 

“I’m so sorry,” he sobs. “I’m so, _so_ sorry, Remus.” 

Remus only shakes his head and holds his father’s face in his hands, warm now with his mother’s old quilt around him. He holds those stubbly cheeks in his palms and sees the cracks in the older man’s eyes and says, “It’s okay,” and then, when John continues to blubber. “Everything’ll work out.” 

He finally understands the lie. He will be the brave one now, whatever it takes. 

* * *

iv. fateline 

For Peter Pettigrew, bravery is a noun. 

It is a word in the dictionary, a concept which his mind can comprehend but not apply. 

Bravery (brav•er•y) 

/ˈbrāv(ə)rē/: courageous behavior or character.

He understands it in a certain capacity, and to Peter, even to run is to be brave. When the neighbourhood schoolboys give chase after yet another strange incident involving the watery eyed, round faced boy, he tells himself he is brave for evading them, and his mother only feeds into the belief.

The torment starts early, and it becomes constant. His mind adapts and expands like elastic to accommodate for the reality of it all. What little barriers he attempts to build always collapse against the throttling of his mother’s words: berating him, begging him, bribing him. 

“Come sit with Mummy and watch telly, Peter,” she’ll call, “I’ll give you a chocolate.”

And bravery is enduring those hours, chin held high, while she rambles on and on. Bravery is nursing the headache after. It is finding new things to daydream about as she drones. 

It is the root of him, the pith of his very existence. There in that too-small, too-cluttered house in Upper Appleby, he assures himself that even to survive is a feat of the highest measure. Even to make it another day, even to keep dragging his scuffed sneakers along the road. To go to school again after the bad day before, to come home again after the nightmare of that morning, to wake up at all. 

Bravery in breathing, in a beating heart. In spite of it all, he keeps going. Self-preservation is ingrained in him from the start, with every thermometer stuck between his lips and every pill laid on his breakfast plate. 

“You’ve got to stay healthy,” his mother says, pinching his cheek to flush. “It’s very important to look after yourself, Petey. Always put yourself first.”

And she’s right, of course. Mother is always right. She’s only looking after him, that’s all. Even if it’s annoying sometimes, even if it’s suffocating and borderline unbearable, and has resulted in the development of a persistent eye twitch he can’t seem to get rid of, she’s only saying all of this because she _cares._

Like when he was four and he fell off his bike. Instead of getting back up on his own, she picked him up, and that was the start of it. When he was seven and got hay fever, and she put the hankie to his nose for him and said, flatly, “Blow.” As if he couldn’t do it on his own. As if he was a weak thing, a delicate thing. 

From the very start, Peter is treated as if he is a breeze away from breaking. It does something to him; grows dark inside, a deeply rooted pitfall seed. 

She tells him it will happen no matter what. That the bullies will keep coming even if he stands up to them, and so he never tries. That people die—like his father—even if you try so hard to love them. That those you care for, deeply, must be kept as close as possible and watched with careful eye, else they might just leave you. 

Bravery, in short, is a means to an end. It is a stone cast out in the name of the Greater Good, but it’s a featherlight thing on unbalanced scales. Bravery is not enough. It will never be enough. 

* * *

v. sunline 

For Lily Evans, bravery is an instinct, it is a reflex. It is the silent split second between an empty hand and the hilt of her wand against her curled palm. It is white-knuckles, bending ribs, and broken bones. It is to be ruthless, to be reckless. 

Even from the start, she battles with the constant war of order against chaos. To her, this is accomplished in what ways she is capable. To prevent as many things from going wrong as possible, to make sure she never gets _too_ stressed out or _too_ emotional. 

She always does her homework right after school and lays out her clothes the night before. She avoids most of the students in her school and favours a book instead, mostly because she finds the boys gross, and the girls rather dull. 

Tuney, despite this, invites her to play British Bulldogs with the rest of them. She braids Lily’s hair each night at the younger girls behest and does not complain, for they both agree that the resulting tight curls that form are worth the effort. Tuney tries, and thus is Lily’s only real friend.

But when these incidents occur—like Lily making all of the leaves on a tree fall off when she’s upset, or making bushes catch on fire when she’s angry, or making storms start and thunder rumble, making flowers bloom and wither—Tuney always gives her the cold shoulder for days afterward. 

Lily, as a result, goes out of her _way_ to prove that she is not, in fact, a freak. She’s especially not even a _Freak_ with a capital F, which Petunia wrote in her diary, which Lily only learned because she got upset and snooped. She’s not strange or abnormal, her parents assure her. She’s just… a little different, and that’s perfectly alright.

But Lily still puts her hair in bows, and doesn’t draw too much attention to herself in class, and makes her arts and crafts projects uglier than Petunia’s—which happens to be no small feat. 

She tries. She reaches, and sneaks into Petunia’s room at night, and begs and cries and apologises, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I broke your music box when I got mad, I shouldn’t have been mad at all,” and Petunia will grunt and lift her floral coverlet to admit the younger sister. 

For things crack, and things break. Things split apart at the seams and shatter in her fury. No matter how many times she practises her cursive or ties her shoe laces or makes her bed in the morning, it will always come. That jerk of movement, that flame which cannot be stifled. 

“You’re a witch,” the boy from Spinner’s End tells her, and here is a name for the freakishness that Petunia hates so terribly. Here is a history, here are rules and truths. Here is sense, finally. _Finally_ she knows she’s not alone in this world, _finally_ she knows she’s not the only one fighting against the chaos.

But that will be her greatest lesson in all of this: that one can’t fight those base instincts for long. She can stick her nose up all she likes, she can apply logic to it as much as she wants, but in the end magic is a wildfire—smouldering, constantly hungry, constantly in need of feeding—and she can either surrender to the will of it, or be brave enough to tame the damn thing and take it for her own.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> so some notes! firstly, this story is going to span all seven years of the marauders’ time in school, and each chapter will be a year. right now i have the first three years complete and i’m working on the fourth!! so far every chapter has been in the range of 30-50k words, by the way. if those lengths are too long and don’t sound appealing, i can definitely split each chapter up into bits and alter the chapter count of the story, so just let me know what works best!!
> 
> second, the first couple of years are mostly just developing the characters & relationships, but around year four things are going to get darker & more serious (though there’ll still be a lot of jokes and good times, like sirius getting drunk and convincing an equally drunk lily to give him a tattoo, remus and lily growing a stupidly big pumpkin in year five for undisclosed reasons). 
> 
> thirdly, if you’re still interested, you can follow my tumblr (@jamepotters) for updates & sneak peeks!! everything about this story is posted under the tag ‘gfs&s’ <3
> 
> happy holidays!! stay safe!!


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